Revealed Only After the Fall (3)
The Marquis Montpellier acted very politely towards me.
Still, I knew he was just a dog dressed in human skin.
The lords of the center and the north had been surprised by this little dog’s loud barking, and so had allowed themselves to be tied to posts.
Those brave men who did not have to die in the winter winds died all the same.
In other words, Marquis Montpellier, who stood before me, was the main reason that the north had become a field of bones.
My mind soared to great heights of anger and hatred. I wanted to kill this man there and then, but I knew that there were ways to handle things subtly.
Thus, I had to endure his presence and hold my anger.
All the while, a thousand murderous impulses flashed through me, and I went through countless reasons so as to not kill the Marquis.
Then, a different thought entered my brain.
I was in a fortress far to the north where the kingdom’s eyes, let alone the empire’s, did not reach. It is a harsh land where people often die in blizzards while traveling on the road, their corpses buried under the snow.
It meant that none would know if a single imperial dog died here.
Bury his corpse in the snowfields, and the northern blizzards would remove any trace of it. Even more thorough would be to take the dead Marquis far into the mountains, where the monsters would gobble him up without even leaving a bit of bone. Even if questions came later, it would be easy to say that his fate was unknown.
Whether by a blizzard or a group of orcs that had not been killed, many excuses existed to cover up his murder.
I started to ponder upon such things in all sincerity.
“Hmmm,” I muttered as I thought whether I would slit his throat then and there, but a ranger sent me a discreet hand signal.
‘Soon, After, Arrival, Three, Cavalry.’
I frowned when I interpreted his meaning. He had told me that the shrewd Marquis had made sure that everyone knew where he was before he stepped into my hall. The ranger discreetly asked me if he had to send men out to kill the cavalrymen.
I wondered at their chances: seventy percent in fair weather but only twenty percent if a snowstorm blew in.
I concluded that the risks were too high for me to strike the head off of this dog of the empire.
Still, the harm this man had done to the north was too great, but for the time being, it seemed that the Marquis’ neck would remain firmly affixed to his shoulders.
I knew the day would come for him to pay for the blood he had spilled and pay for it dearly.
“Your Highness?” the Marquis asked, not knowing how close he had come to dying. He stared at me with that abominable face of his.
The Marquis of Montpellier wriggled his eyebrows at me.
“You won’t find us to be hospitable,” I told him.
He was polite to the best of his abilities, yet it seemed whatever the plan that he had, had been foiled by sternness, so he swiftly changed his expression into a smirk as he changed his tact.
“Ah, but at a time, you and I had tried to do great things! It is difficult if you remain so sad.”
I had almost expelled him, but I stiffened at his words.
“Great things?”
The Marquis gave me a sly glance and a nod that clearly showed he wanted to discuss something in private.
“Leave us,” I told the rangers and the messengers.
Only the Marquis and I were left.
“What great things are we planning together?”
“Ah, and you pretend not to know of them!” the Marquis stated, and his face had become quite grim.
“No. I really don’t know.”
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“Oh my lord, it’s difficult if you do things like this. I have come from afar, and I came here in good faith.”
I stared at the Marquis, and as I did, his face took on a severe expression.
“So you, First Prince, after gaining the fair reputation of, ah, of Savior of the North, do you still desire to be only a prince? Heh?” the Marquis asked me, a tone of threat creeping into his voice. “Hoho, don’t be mistaken! Just because you got a little fame here does not mean the corruption, the filth, can be washed from your body, oh no!”
I instinctively knew that this body’s previous owner had done something that had spiraled out of his control. The problem was, I could not figure out what it is that Adrian had done. Fortunately, there was someone eager to furnish me with an answer.
“Yes, you, you are the trash that sold your own country’s knights, yes? If these northmen knew about your past, do you think that they will follow you, these honest men?” the Marquis said, revealing the true color of things and answering my question before I had even asked it.
“Yes, this castle you have built in the north, it is only a sand castle! It will collapse under a single wave. If they knew you were a spy, an informant, a traitor, would they stand behind you as they do now?”
“What exactly did I do?”
“Hoh! You don’t even know how to be ashamed. ‘Please tell me’, you ask. For you, it was a sin, but for me, a great achievement! There is nothing of it that I cannot tell you!” the Marquis spat out, his contempt for me plain.
So I listened to him. The Leonberger family had prepared secret troops over many generations, and their training and arming had come at astronomical costs and manpower. Adrian Leonberger had betrayed these troops’ presence to the empire and had even made sure that the three leading knights had their rings broken so that they could not inform on him, on the traitor that had been appointed as their master.
“Oho, those men were truly loyal, and if they had been born in our empire, we would have used them openly! Ah, they must have been sorry to meet with you, such an unscrupulous master,” the Marquis of Montpellier said, clearly having fun at my expense with his expository explanations.
I tightly closed my eyes: Knights who had denied their monarch with bloody tears, some who had insulted those who had pledged themselves to the lords of the empire, and others still that had become part of the warrior mother’s faction. And, among them all, a king who could do nothing but watch as all the walls around him crumbled into dust.
I pictured these terrible scenes in my mind as if I had seen them with my own eyes.
My head was spinning.
I knew Adrian was a fool, yet I had been confident that the evil deeds of his past could not surprise me.
That has proved to be an illusion – the First Prince was a greater piece of shit than I had thought possible.
To think that he had sold out the secret knighthood of his own family to the greatest enemy of the kingdom!
Well, now, I knew.
I had always wondered at the true reason for the king’s hateful gazes and cold treatment of me. His actions, his abandonment of his eldest son, had never been an excessive response. I have now learned the original sin of this idiotic prince, and I now found it incomprehensible that the king had even allowed such a pest, such a cockroach of a man, to continue to live.
I would have beaten Adrian a hundred times; a thousand times! I would have torn him into thousands of little fleshy bits until not a trace of his body remained.
“Hmmm, I think I remember now,” I stated plainly to the Marquis of Montpellier, and he shuddered when he looked into my face.
“Yes! You are only alive because of my empire, it did not want your death. And you know if we do not support you, you can never be the king.”
Everything was exactly as the Marquis had described it. The king would never allow his eldest son, who had sold out the kingdom’s knights, to ascend the throne.
“Hoh, but don’t worry, Your Highness!” the Marquis said, his expression guarded. “That is why I have come here, to you.”
He was staring straight into my eyes now.
“I will make you the king.”
It was absurd, and I found it unreasonable to listen to a foreigner talk about the throne as if it was already in my grasp.
However, the irrational actions had been done by that chubby idiot of a prince, not the Marquis of Montpellier.
No, the Marquis was just making his small contribution to ensure that a puppet did not escape the web that it had fallen into.
“What are the conditions of your offer, then?” I asked, my curiosity piqued.
“It is just okay if you do what I ask, sometimes. Other than that, well, you can enjoy all the pleasures and all the powers that a king can wield.”
The Marquis already talked as if we were in the same boat. His face was one that firmly believed that his little royal informant would never be able to reject him.
And he was right.
If you have committed such a sin and succumbed to such utter weakness, wouldn’t you pretend to die if you didn’t just kill yourself outright?
“What happened to the knights whose rings were broken?” I demanded.
“Huh? Oh, I didn’t kill them, I did not have to! Rather, it is a burden for the king if they are just alive.”
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I gave a sigh of relief.
“I’m glad, then I still have a chance to make up,” I said as I looked at the Marquis. He frowned at me, clearly not understanding what I meant.
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“Do you have a list of them and their locations?”
“Surely, but why-“
“It’s uncomfortable to leave things as they are.”
The Marquis stretched his eyes wide and quickly burst into laughter.
“Hoh, you are more thorough than I thought!”
“I’m a bit like that, yes,” I said as I laughed along with the Marquis of Montpellier.
* * *
The Marquis was helping out where he could, saying that the advance payment I would receive for sharing the secret was on its way to Winter Castle.
“So, let me use it well.”
I saw no reason to refuse such funds.
“Then, Your Highness, I hope to see you in good form soon in the royal palace,” the Marquis said as he bowed down to me, acting extremely friendly.
“Then, you will be free!”
I once more laughed along with the Marquis.
“Be careful on your journey, Marquis. Some of the orcs who have crossed the mountains are still alive and wandering.”
“Hoh… have you ever seen such ugly things? But Your Highness and the brave northern soldiers are working so hard day and night, these things, they will be wiped out in no time.”
“I sure hope so, Marquis,” I said as I saw him off.
“You!” I called to Gunn as soon as the Marquis was well on his way. She appeared silently at my side, and I gave her my orders. She nodded and led away a few of her fellow elves. After Gunn had disappeared, I called Antoine to me.
“Your Highness, I came as soon as I heard your summons,” the captain of the Silver Foxes said as he came to me.
I handed an envelope to Antoine, and he cringed more than was necessary.
“Antoine, find all the people on that list and bring them to me.”
“You mean all?”
“Not a single one must be missing.”
“There are so many people on here!” he said after studying the list for a while. “It will take some time to track them all down.”
“I don’t care, just make sure you remain discreet.”
“If there is nothing else,” Antoine said as he bowed to me in an exaggerated fashion and then left.
My eyes briefly wandered in the direction that the Marquis of Montpellier had left in, and then I made my way to the castle proper.
* * *
The Marquis of Montpellier went into the winter with a light heart and a spring in his step.
His journey had been worth the entire slog to this barbaric land, as he had been able to put the leash around that mad dog, the First Prince Adrian.
“Ah, this should be enough.”
Since the First Prince was already well organized, the Marquis could say that he had a rough plan to defend the north in the person of Adrian. If censure faced him in his home country, he knew that his efforts here would make an excellent example of his continued efficacy as ambassador.
He knew that if he handled this crisis well, he would be opening a broad path into the future.
He had planned things just right so that the number one enemy of the royal family was squarely beneath imperial control, so the future held little worry.
Immediately after his return, he knew that he would orchestrate the removal of key nobles and shove the First Prince onto the stage. Night soon descended as the Marquis of Montpellier fell asleep in his carriage while making plans and creating schemes.
When he woke up, the world had changed.
Everything around him was dark; he couldn’t see a thing and could not move a single inch of his body.
He tried to shout for help but found that some unknown object had been jammed into his mouth.
All the Marquis of Montpellier could do was wiggle his toes and drool in fear.
What the hell is this affront to a servant of the empire?
He didn’t understand what the cause of his predicament was.
He knew that the atmosphere in the north was volatile after the war, with bandits and peasants at times daring to attack the carriages of nobles.
Yet, if bandits had attacked him, then surely his escort of knights would have torn through the braggarts.
Then, have I been captured by those ugly orcs?
No, he decided that made even less sense. If those monsters, who acted only on instinct, had attacked him, he would surely already be dead.
He rolled the scenario time after time through his scheming mind, yet no answer came.
Even more perplexing was the constant smell of fresh grass; it did not suit the northern winter at all.
He did not even know for how long he had been hogtied, for there was no way by which he could tell the time.
And then the blindfold that covered his eyes was ripped away.
Torchlight punched into his eyes, forcing his pupils to shrink, yet he could recognize the familiar face before him.
“Hmmeeehupphhmmu!” he said to that face.
“Oh, I forgot to loosen the gag.”
In the next moment, the person’s hand roughly removed the bunched-up cloth that had been shoved into the Marquis’ mouth.
The Marquis of Montpellier spat and raised his head in disgust.
The grotesque human before him was none other than Prince Adrian.
“What is this!? Why do you take me so!?”
The First Prince only laughed at the Marquis’ angry shouts.
“Not my plan at first, I tried to be patient with you,” Adrian said, still laughing, and yet his laughter was strangely eerie.
“But see here, my dear Marquis of Montpellier, you just keep on giving me reasons to kill you!”
“What? Do you think you’ll be safe from the empire if you do this? We, the only ones that can protect you?”
“I don’t know, but look at yourself, Marquis! You couldn’t even keep yourself safe, not from my fine friends, at least.”
At the words of the First Prince, the Marquis took in his surroundings.
Only
Ghosts in green cloaks were standing about, and they were the only thing he could see other than the infinite expanse of the pure white of a snowfield.
The Marquis was terrified.
“Well, Your Highness, you must face reality! You can fix your shame if I return alive, for I am able to bear these small grudges. And if I do not support you, Your Highness, you can never ascend to the throne. The king, he will not allow the royal traitor who had broken his aspirations to succeed him, now will he?” the Marquis asked, and he believed every word of what he said.
“Right, right, the informant cannot become the king,” the First Prince said, expressing his deepest sympathy for the Marquis’ viewpoint.
“Yes! So then if you free me, even now, it will be poss-“
“But I can be king,” Adrian interjected before the gorgeous Marquis could even finish his attempt at sibilant persuasion.
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“I have already toppled one king, my dear Montpellier,” the First prince added, his voice determined, and his face full of confidence.
All the Marquis managed to do then was to tremble in fear and beg for his life while lying flat in the snow.